


One of those big moments

by modern_leper



Category: Superstore (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post Amnesty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 04:44:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14536923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modern_leper/pseuds/modern_leper
Summary: Amy sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, I already know I'm going to regret asking this, but screw it. What was her question?”“She asked me if our crushes with each other had lined up, would she and I have ever gotten together.”“...oh.”-----Post-AmnestyIf Jonah and Amy had been a little more honest with each other.





	One of those big moments

He caught her outside the break room seconds after she had clocked out. 

“Amy!” he called out, and she froze with only one arm in her jacket and the other wrapped up in a purse strap. She fumbled with them both for a moment before giving up and just dropping her purse on the ground, muttering a curse under her breath. She bent down to pick it up only to have half its contents spill out onto the hallway floor. 

She stared down at the puddle of tampons, receipts, and loose change, and for a moment she felt utterly defeated. 

“Yup,” she said aloud, though more to herself than anyone else. “This is exactly the kind of day I'm having.”

Before she could start cleaning up the mess Jonah was already kneeling down and collecting everything in his arms. 

“You don't have to do that,” she told him half-heartedly. 

“No it's fine, it was kind of my fault anyway, I distracted you.” She held open the bag as he tossed the items he'd gathered back in. 

“Fair enough, I guess. What did you want?” She wasn't trying to sound impatient, but it was clear she wanted to get the hell out of dodge. 

“Oh yeah…I needed…I just…could we talk?” He was staring deliberately down at her purse in an apparent effort to avoid eye contact. 

“We are talking.”

“I know. I meant like, could we go somewhere and talk about everything that happened today?”

“You mean without twenty of our coworkers and a member of the clergy present?” She couldn't help but sound bitter, though it earned a smile from him. 

“I'm happy to call in a priest if you want, but I was thinking more along the lines of just the two of us.”

She clenched her jaw and ran a hand through her hair in a tired gesture. 

“I don't think that's such a good idea. ‘Just the two of us’ has been the source of pretty much all our problems today.” She saw him open his mouth to protest and she cut him off. “Besides, I have a hard enough time taking you seriously when you're not holding my lipstick and a panty liner.”

He looked down at his hands and quickly shoved the two offending items into her bag. He gave her a pleading look but didn't ask again. She felt herself soften, despite the flare of annoyance she felt at him pulling the kicked puppy face on her. 

“Now?” she caved. 

“Yes. Please,” he added quickly. 

She finished tugging on her jacket completely. “Where? Your place? I'm not doing…whatever this is in the hallway.”

He shook his head. “Garrett's at home.”

“Well so is Emma. Any other ideas? Finley’s?” she asked, suggesting the bar down the street where Cloud 9 employees occasionally took advantage of the happy hour. Or got taken advantage of themselves, depending on how you viewed the hangovers they were sporting at opening shift the next morning. 

“I have a better idea.” 

\-----

Five minutes later they were both pulling themselves up and out of the crawl space and into the room that housed all of Cloud 9’s recalled merchandise. 

“Seriously?” Amy wiped the dust off the knees of her jeans. “You want to do this here?” They'd had fun here the other week going through all the recalls, which all seemed to fall on a weird spectrum of incredibly dangerous to impossibly racist. But it wasn't what she had in mind when she pictured the backdrop to whatever awkward discussion Jonah was about to force them to have. 

“Yeah, why not? It's quiet, private. No one's going to walk in. Or crawl in, technically.”

“I guess…” She absent-mindedly ran her hands over a pile of Care Bear knockoffs whose voice boxes began to sound less whimsical and more demonic as their batteries began to die. They'd been a big seller during the previous Christmas season but by February were being returned enmasse. Amy remembered one particular parent shoving a doll into her hands and demanding to know why her child's toy made noises like Tom Waits getting a blow job from Bonnie Tyler. The image had haunted Amy's dreams for a week. 

She heard Jonah clear his throat and dragged herself back into the present. He looked at her expectantly. 

She pointed at herself and raised a brow. “You're waiting on me to say something? You're the one who wanted to talk, so talk!” 

“I was kind of hoping you'd forget that part so I wouldn't have to go first.” He had the decency to look a little ashamed of himself at least. He crossed and uncrossed his arms nervously, then switched to playing with a loose thread at the bottom of his plaid shirt. 

“Oh for the love of God man just spit-”

“How long ago did you have a crush on me?” he cut her off with the question. For a moment Amy's jaw hung open from her unfinished thought, and then it seemed to stay there from shock. 

“Seriously?!” she snapped. “That's what's this is about? You dragged me to the island of misfit toys to talk about a stupid crush?”

“It's not stupid! Not to me, at least.”

“Well that's nice, it really is, but I'm not doing this. This is so fucking high school dude. What are you going to do if I tell you, ask me to homecoming?”

“No, that's not - look, I get why -,” he groaned, nothing coming out quite the way he meant it to. He took a deep breath. “I understand that after everything that happened today this probably seems like a pointless and inane question. And I know that at this point the only thing you probably want to do about this whole situation is go home and get drunk about it. I do too. But I have something I want to tell you, and before I do I need you to answer my question. Even if you think it's dumb, or embarrassing, or high school, or whatever.”

“I don't know, I didn't mark the date on my calendar! What does it even-”

“I broke up with Kelly,” he cut her off with a rushed voice. 

Her mouth was still hanging open from her unfinished sentence, but she made no move to close it. Slowly she began to shake her head from side to side. 

“No. No, no, no, no, no you didn't. Not because of me, please don't say it was because of me.” She sounded panicked at the idea. 

Jonah threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “No, not because of you! Not really. It was because of me.”

Amy's eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

“So you know how I'm sort of a big people pleaser?”

“Uh huh. It's one of your more annoying qualities.”

Jonah frowned a little. “I mean I think most people would use the word sweet, maybe even endearing-”

“When describing the trait in children, not in grown ass men,” she finished for him. 

“Okay, point. I guess that kind of brings me back to what I was going to say: I know I'm a people pleaser, and that I will go out of my way to avoid delivering bad news to someone.”

“That sounds like a nice euphemism for lying.” 

“Basically,” he admitted. “And it's been something I've been trying to work on lately.”

“Okay…” replied Amy, clearly not seeing what any of this had to do with the break up. 

“So I went to talk Kelly earlier, after the whole break room debacle.”

“There's a word you don't get to use very often.”

“Right?!” Jonah lit up for a moment before remembering that he'd been in the middle of a story. “Sorry, anyway, she obviously wasn't doing, you know, awesome. And I wanted to make her feel better. I wasn't even planning on breaking up with her. I swear, the thought hadn't even crossed my mind. And if it had it definitely wasn't going to be in the produce section.”

“Yeah that kind of thing is really better suited for housewares.”

Jonah shot her an annoyed look.

She threw her hands up. “Sorry. It's in my nature to make fun of you.”

He snorted. “Yeah, I've noticed. Can you fight that instinct for like, two minutes, please?”

“I can try. So if you weren't planning on dumping her in front of a pile of fruit, why did you?”

“She asked me a question I wasn't expecting. And my options were to lie to her and make her feel better, or tell her the truth and let her be mad at me. A year ago, I probably would have lied. Part of me still wanted to but when the moment came I just…couldn't.”

Amy sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, I already know I'm going to regret asking this, but screw it. What was her question?”

“She asked me if our crushes with each other had lined up, would she and I have ever gotten together.”

“...oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So that's why you wanted to ask me-”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Amy's brain couldn't seem to come up with a more intelligent response. She was having plenty of thoughts, but nothing she wanted to rush sharing out loud just yet. 

Jonah, apparently having gained courage just by making it this far into the conversation, plowed on to fill the silence. 

“I couldn't lie to her. No matter how bad I wanted to. So I told her the truth. I told her no.”

Amy slumped back against a pallet of recalled diapers that was almost as tall as she was. When she spoke, it was with the most timid voice Jonah had ever heard her use. 

“You don't know that,” she said, barely louder than a whisper. 

Jonah took a few tentative steps toward her. “Yeah Ames, I do.”

She looked up at him. “How?”

“Because my crush started about three minutes into my first day. When you were just a woman I was flirting with over a pile of fallen toilet paper. And then I found out you were married, and I still liked you. And then I dated other people, and I still liked you. And then I kissed you, and if that other stuff wasn't going to discourage a crush then that sure as hell wasn't going to. I liked you for three straight years, and I like you now, and if for one second I had ever thought you felt that way about me too, that would've been it for me. I would never have given Kelly a second thought.”

His voice had gotten faster and faster as he spoke, like a floodgate had opened and given him permission to say all the things he'd kept to himself for over three years. He had closed the space between them and was practically on top of her by the time his speech was done. She stood flush against pallet, looking down determinedly at their shoes, momentarily speechless. 

“I haven't liked you for three years,” she finally eked out. 

“Yeah, I figured.” His didn't sound remotely offended. 

“You were really annoying at first.”

“I still am. You don't have to pretend.”

She smiled even though she knew he couldn't see it. She couldn't bring herself to look up, to meet his eyes. Because if she did, and he looked at her the way he she thought he would, the way he did after they'd kissed and she'd left him standing in the parking lot as she drove away with Adam, then that would be it. There wouldn't be any more talking. There'd be a lot of something else, something that would be a lot harder to take back than words. 

“I've liked you for longer than I should have,” she said quietly. 

“What does that mean?” God his voice was close. 

“It means I liked you when I was still married to Adam. Even before I knew our marriage was circling the drain. Though I maybe should have taken it as a sign when I was more excited to work a closing shift with you than I was to get home and spend time with my actual husband.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, actually meaning it. Not that her marriage has ended, but that he'd made it any harder on her. He took a small step back, suddenly worried that he might be making her feel trapped, which was not exactly the feeling he was aiming for. 

She finally allowed herself to look up and meet his eyes. She shrugged, gave a sad smile. “It's not your fault. Not really. People are messy. Relationships are messier. Just ask the girl you left crying in front of banana display.”

“She didn't cry actually. Kelly is a lot tougher than most people give her credit for.”

Amy cocked her head to the side and squinted. “Yeah, probably. Or maybe you just weren't quite the catch you thought you were.”

Jonah looked taken aback for a moment before something in his eyes seemed to click and a grin split across his face. 

“I thought I asked you to resist the urge to make fun of me?”

Amy shrugged again, a smirk tugging at her lips. “I promised you two minutes. That was at least four minutes ago.”

“How generous of you.”

“I try.”

A silence fell between them. Not an uncomfortable one, but something about it felt important. 

Amy knew from experience that most of the important things in life are determined in really small moments, not grand gestures. It was the little choices you made that often ended up having the biggest repercussions later on. Once upon a time a football player passed a note to his crush asking her to prom, and sixteen years later Amy was a divorced single mom. The butterfly effect, in much less poetic terms. 

But every once in a while the big moments came around. The Hollywood movie moments. Marriage proposals and child births and weddings and funerals. Moments that may as well come with bright flashing lights that spell out YOUR LIFE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE. 

This felt like one of those big moments. Even though they were minimum wage employees in a forgotten warehouse of the big box store they worked at. Even though they were both still wearing their obnoxiously blue polyester work vests. Even though they were surrounded by varying degrees of hazardous, flammable, or potentially toxic recalled merchandise. Despite all those things, Amy could tell that whatever happened next was going to be important. A very large flap of a butterfly wings, no matter how small or insignificant their lives may have appeared. 

Jonah took a step forward again. She could smell coffee on his breath and the scent of his soap, something herbal, probably made from locally sourced ingredients and purchased at a farmers market. She didn't feel trapped though. 

She met his gaze, something she'd been so scared to do only moments ago, and felt his fingers brush against her hip. His other hand came up slowly to the side of her face, like he was afraid she might bolt if he moved too quickly. 

She squeezed her eyes shut and took a shaky breath, deciding to offer him one last out. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

When after a few seconds he offered no response she allowed herself to open her eyes and look at him. He was smiling. 

“Nah. I think it's a great one.”

His lips, still smiling, pressed into hers, and she suspected he was right.


End file.
